Well haven't blogged up much of late as not too much has been going on except for a bit of study, looking for work and a little bit of shopping for Xmas, not to mention forking out a little bit on my Intel based system as my Christmas present. So yep got an Intel Core i5 2500 CPU, Gigabyte Intel GA-P67-DS3-B3 board, and I'm about to get 8GB of Corsair DDR3 RAM, lovely eh??? All for a bit of gaming. So I have to say there is some geeky stuff ahead here of a computer based nature.
The idea behind this is of course is to build myself a very decent gaming rig, as I had heard Intel processors are supposed to be better for gaming overall. Although I have always used AMD in the past, and the last Intel based system I built was back in 2001 so this will be a switch up from that, as that was only a Pentium III at 800MHz. I have already tested out the board, memory and cpu and they all work really well, and I was even surprised to see that when I ran the 3D gaming benchmark, 3DMark Vantage that the Intel 2500's CPU score was actually higher than the AMD Phenom II 1090T, which I have, as the score reached 1000 marks higher! Most of the Intel processors right now are based on quad core technology, and while AMD have already branched out to six and eight core, AMD still appear to be a bit behind the race in the market, as Intel while more expensive, still are the market leaders. Regardless though if you want a decent system, you can't really go wrong with either Intel or AMD, as they both rule the roost on the computer hardware market.
So I look forward to swapping my main desktop case around for the spare computer system I have (which is in a smaller case) so I can start to use the system properly as my main system, and hopefully all being well it all will be fine (well hopefully!). But I won't be doing this till nearer Christmas, most likely on Christmas Eve, and well as I type this we are less than a week away from Christmas just now, so it really won't be that long now.
Naturally I will be also quite keen to check out some games, as I have already tried Call of Duty Black Ops, an excellent FPS from last year, which saw the COD series really get back on track, after the somewhat disappointing Modern Warfare 2. In Modern Warfare 2, I could see that they were making a move toward making the series that bit more edgy and disturbing, and to anyone who has played the game, call me a wuss, but I didn't like the scene where you gun down innocent people at the airport, its just a bit heavy (and yep I didn't take part in it either!). But I'm drifting away here a bit, Black Ops, however is a great addition to the COD series, and a breath of fresh air, as it added a new dimension to it, by covering the time of the cold war, and the Vietnam war. The single player campaign itself is quite gripping and very entertaining as well, and features some excellent voice acting from Sam Worthington, Gary Oldman and Ed Harris. The game is also fairly demanding for a PC system, so if you want to run it at max settings, you will need a decent rig (which I think the Intel will be up to!).
So that's just one game I will check out quite a few others, such as Splinter Cell Conviction, the latest in the series of stealth games, which sees the hardened veteran stealth agent Sam Fisher forced back into going undercover to bust a conspiracy wide open, and Prince of Persia the Forgotten Sands, a very entertaining platform action game. I also quite fancy playing Batman Arkham City, which I haven't got yet, but hopefully I will get it in time for Christmas (or as a present maybe!), as I had previously played Arkham Asylum, which is a great game in its own right, and Arkham City is supposed to be the same. Although the trouble with new PC games, such as BAC when they come out, is the bugs that can be found in the game, and the game is supposed to be optimised for DirectX 11, but there have been many bugs found with the DX11 features of the game. However the game itself has been found to run really well in DirectX9 from what I have read, and its surprising just how many of today's games still utilise the DX9 technology, and these games still look amazing. In a way DirectX 11 technology feels like it has still to be fully utilised, and while there are quite a few games that use DirectX 10, DirectX9 is still the main one used in PC gaming today. At the end of the day (to pardon the cliche) technology such as DX11 just adds some more fancy effects, or the new bells and whistles, but it isn't ultimately what makes the game great.
Anyyyywayyyyyy that's enough for now, I'll probably put up a bit more once the gaming rig is fully set up, and just maybe if I play Batman Arkham City, I'll put up something about it here.
Till then, the Christmas countdown continues, more posts will follow.
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